INTRODUCTION—THE RUMBLE OF PANIC BENEATH EVERYTHING
1. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973), pp. 283–84.
2. We used the Revised Standard Version of this text in our wedding, though I added the word come as a way of emphasizing the fact that we were summoning each other into a life of “exalting the Lord together.”
3. According to the World Health Organization, reported in The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/un-report-uncovers-global-child-abuse-419700.html.
4. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3. Spoken by Macduff.
5. Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 283–84.
6. Ann Patchett, “Scared Senseless,” The New York Times Magazine, October 20, 2002.
7. Reported by Philip Yancey in Where Is God When It Hurts? (Zondervan, 2002), p. 77.
8. Robert Andrews, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 125.
9. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Harper, 2001), p. 94.
10. Ibid., p. 91.
11. “How Firm a Foundation,” hymn by John Rippon, 1787.
CHAPTER 1—THE CULTURES OF SUFFERING
12. Max Scheler, “The Meaning of Suffering,” in On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings, ed. H. J. Bershady (University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 98.
13. This is the pioneering social theorist Max Weber, quoted in Christina Simko, “The Rhetorics of Suffering,” American Sociological Review 7 (6), p. 882. See Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 138ff (chapter IX, “Theodicy, Salvation, and Rebirth”).
14. Richard A. Shweder, Nancy C. Much, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Lawrence Park, “The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering,” in Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology, ed. Richard A. Shweder (Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 74.
15. Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (Vintage, 1974), p. 185. Berger, in this work and in The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Anchor, 1967), follows Max Weber in using the word theodicy to describe this feature of every society or culture—namely, a way of bestowing meaning on suffering for sufferers. However, as originally coined by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, the term meant “justifying the ways of God in the wake of tragedy.” Theodicy has traditionally meant a defense of God’s reality against the argument that evil and suffering prove that God cannot exist. See Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St Andrews in 2003 (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 6–7 and footnotes. I think the word is best used with Leibniz’s original, more theological meaning, rather than as Berger deploys it.
16. Simko, “Rhetorics,” p. 884.
17. Maureen Dowd, “Why, God?” The New York Times, December 25, 2012.
18. Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 4.
19. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 78.
20. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 57.
21. Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, The Gift of Pain (Zondervan, 1997), p. 12.
22. See Berger, The Sacred Canopy, pp. 60–65.
23. Scheler, “The Meaning of Suffering,” p. 98.
24. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, p. 62. Berger’s discussion of “theodicies”—various cultural strategies for dealing with suffering—heavily relies on the typology of Max Weber.
25. See Berger, Sacred Canopy, pp. 73–76. Berger puts Calvinistic Christianity in this category and gives the category the unfortunate name religious masochism.
26. Weber, Sociology of Religion, pp. 144–5.
27. Ibid., p. 62.
28. Shweder, et al., Why Do Men Barbecue?, p. 125.
29. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Basic Books, 1996), pp. 132–3.
30. Ibid., p. 96.
31. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 360.
32. Shweder, et al., Why Do Men Barbecue?, p. 74.
33. Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 360.
34. This is the burden of Dawkins’s TV program Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life, which was televised in October 2012. See the video at http://www.channel4.com/programmes/sex-death-and-the-meaning-of-life.
35. Schweder, et al., Why Do Men Barbecue?, p. 125.
36. Ibid.
37. James Davies, The Importance of Suffering: The Value and Meaning of Emotional Discontent (Routledge, 2012), p. 29.
38. Ibid., pp. 1–2.
39. Ibid., p. 2.
40. Ibid.
41. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Harper, 2009), p. 77.
42. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 373, 375.
43. http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas-mccoy-family-center-ethics-society-stanford-university/lives-moral-saints.
44. Scheler, “Meaning of Suffering,” p. 110.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 111.
48. Ibid.
49. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Harper & Row, 1974).
50. Ibid., p. 112.
51. Ibid., p. 113.
CHAPTER 2—THE VICTORY OF CHRISTIANITY
52. My paragraphs on ancient pagan consolation literature rely on Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, chaps. 2–3, and Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (Harper, 2010), chaps. 1–3. See also Robert C. Gregg, Consolation Philosophy: Greek and Christian Paideia in Basil and the Two Gregories (Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1975), chap. 1; and John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (Harper, 1951), chap. 2.
53. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 39.
54. Ferry, Brief History, p. xiv.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., p. 4.
57. Ibid., p. 7.
58. Ibid., pp. 3–5.
59. Ibid., p. xiv.
60. See Ferry’s helpful summary of Stoic philosophy in his Brief History, chap. 2, “The Greek Miracle.” See also Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, pp. 39–40.
61. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 39.
62. Ferry, Brief History, p. 45.
63. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 39.
64. Epictetus, Discourses III, 24, 84–88. Quoted in Ferry, Brief History, pp. 47–48.
65. Ibid., p. 48.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., p. 50.
68. Epictetus, Discourses, III, 24, 91–94, and Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV, 14. Quoted in Ferry, Brief History, p. 37.
69. Here is a summary of Cicero’s advice to sufferers—a “cure of souls”—for sufferers in pain. First, they must be told that their pain should not be surprising to them, that many others have gone through the same experience, and that, in general, such losses and miseries are the lot of all people who live. Second, they must consider that it is “utter folly to be uselessly overcome by sorrow when one realizes that there is no possible advantage.” (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, III, 6, sect. 12, cited in Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 40.) Third, they should remember that time will have a healing effect on their pain, but that they could help accelerate that healing by the use of reason, by recognizing the transitory nature of things, and that all life is just a loan from nature that must be returned.
70. Henri Blocher does a good job of summarizing Eastern thought in this regard in his Evil and the Cross: An Analytical Look at the Problem of Pain (Kregel, 1994), pp. 15–17.
71. I realize that there are many who argue that Buddhism is not a form of pantheism but of atheism, and I know many atheists from Western cultures who have adopted Buddhist practices because they say it provides them a spirituality that does not require belief in God. But Buddhism is not truly atheistic in the Western sense. It believes very firmly in the supernatural and metaphysical; indeed, it believes the natural and the physical are illusions, and that everything is ultimately spirit. Many scholars have pointed out that Buddha did not want to overthrow but to reform the older religions of India. Henri Blocher quotes Ananda Coomaraswamy of Harvard, who wrote that the more one studies it, “the more difficult it becomes to distinguish Buddhism from Brahmanism.” Blocher, Evil and the Cross, p. 17.
72. In addition to the Stoics, this approach to evil and suffering has been largely shared by Western philosophers such as Spinoza, Hegel, and mystics such as Meister Eckhart, as well as writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. And it characterizes much of what has been called “New Age” thought, as well as the views of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. This is based on an understanding of God known as “pantheism.” According to the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy: “Pantheism . . . signifies the belief that every existing entity is only one Being; and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism. At a popular level, the concept of an impersonal Divine Spirit that contains both good and evil has made its way into much science fiction. In the Star Wars movies, we have “The Force,” the single life force binding all life together, containing a “dark side” as well as a good.
73. See Ferry, Brief History, pp. 43–49, for the close parallels between Buddhism and Greek Stoicism.
74. Plutarch, A Letter of Condolence to Apollonius, quoted in Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 43.
75. See Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering. This section and the next are heavily dependent on Rittgers’s excellent and groundbreaking scholarship on this subject.
76. Cyprian, On Mortality, chap. 13. Cited in Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 45.
77. Ibid., p. 47.
78. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (Routledge, 1995).
79. In Ferry, Brief History.
80. Ibid., p. 52.
81. Ambrose of Milan, On the Death of Satyrus. Quoted in Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, pp. 43–44.
82. Ibid., p. 52.
83. Ibid., p. 52–53.
84. Ibid., p. 63.
85. Ibid., p. 46.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., p. 86.
88. Even Seneca, who believed in a God, believed God was subject to the dictates of fate. Fate in the Greco-Roman view is impersonal, its dispensations are completely inexplicable, there can be no appeal to fate for justice—that is a categorical mistake. Fate is completely fickle and random, even when it is poetically personified in the ancient writings. In Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, he well expresses this view: “You are wrong if you think Fortune has changed towards you. Change is her normal behavior, her true nature. . . . You have discovered the changing face of the random goddess. . . . With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel [of chance], like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and from. No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds, but steely hearted laughs at groans her deeds have wrung.” Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, translated with an introduction by Victor Watts (rev. ed.; Penguin, 1999), pp. 23–24.
89. Ibid., pp. 46–47.
90. Ibid., p. 47.
91. Ibid., p. 89.
92. Ibid., pp. 53, 90.
93. See Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, trans. George Demacopoulos (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), and the summary and discussion of this work in Thomas C. Oden, Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition (Fortress Press, 1984). For an overview of Gregory’s Moralia and Pastoral Rule, see Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, pp. 49–52.
94. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 51.
95. Ibid., p. 53.
96. Ibid., p. 61.
97. Ibid., p. 62.
98. Ibid., p. 88.
99. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 29: Lectures on Titus, Philemon, and Hebrews, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Concordia, 1968), p. 189. Cited in Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, pp. 103–104.
100. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 95.
101. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 14: Selected Psalms III, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Concordia, 1968), p. 163. Cited in Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 101.
102. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 112. See chap. 5, “Suffering and the Theology of the Cross,” pp. 111–124.
103. Quoted in ibid., p. 112.
104. Ibid., p. 117.
105. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough (Blackwell, 1990), p. 170.
106. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 117. Luther went further than many Reformation theologians in arguing that God, even in his divine nature, experienced suffering. Luther held, of course, that God’s divine nature cannot lose its omnipotence. God’s divine nature cannot lose its omnipotence. And yet Luther “argued that in Christ, God had willed his deity to be united with human nature in such a way that the divine nature could be said to truly suffer.” To some degree, Luther’s statements reflect his particular view of the communicatio idiomatum—the way the attributes of Christ’s divine and human nature relate to one another. In the Eucharistic controversies of the late 1520s, Luther insisted that the two natures can impart their properties to each other in a way that many Reformed theologians rejected. Nevertheless, the idea that the biblical God participates in and knows human suffering is a biblical teaching, and one that sets Christianity apart from other religions.
107. Ibid., p. 115.
108. Taylor, Secular Age, p. 25.
109. Ibid., p. 542.
110. I know that the order in which I am rolling out these phrases and concepts may lead to the impression that the immanent frame—the “buffered world”—led to the “buffered self.” Actually, Taylor believes the modern self preceded the modern world. His reasons are too complex to recount here.
111. Taylor, Secular Age. The first phrase in this sentence is taken from p. 38 and p. 581, respectively.
112. Ibid., p. 27.
113. Megan L. Wood, “When the New You Carries a Fresh Identity, Too,” The New York Times, February 17, 2013.
114. Taylor, Secular Age, p. 232.
115. Ibid., p. 306.
116. Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), pp. 106–197.
117. Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2007).
118. Ferry, Brief History, pp. 3–5.
119. Susan Jacoby, “The Blessings of Atheism,” The New York Times, January 5, 2013.
CHAPTER 3—THE CHALLENGE TO THE SECULAR
120. Henri Frédéric Amiel’s words are cited in James Davies, The Importance of Suffering: The Value and Meaning of Emotional Discontent (Routledge, 2012), frontispiece.
121. Ibid., p. 75.
122. Samuel G. Freedman, “In a Crisis, Humanists Seem Absent,” The New York Times, December 28, 2012.
123. Jacoby, “Blessings of Atheism.”
124. Ibid.
125. As David L. Chappell argues in A Stone of Hope, it was not white, northern freethinkers and secularists who proposed civil disobedience, a key component in the strategy of the Civil Rights movement. It was the African American church and clergy with their more pessimistic view of sin and human nature. See Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), chap. 2, “Recovering Optimists,” and chap. 5, “The Civil Rights Movement as a Religious Revival.” The New York Times said about the book that “it’s impossible to read the book without doing some fundamental rethinking about the role religion can play in . . . public life.”
126. Quoted in Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 166.
127. Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010).
128. Comment on “Obama’s Speech in Newtown,” http://reason-being.com.
129. For a good statement of the essence of Frankl’s thought, see Emily Esfahani Smith, “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy,” The Atlantic, January 9, 2013.
130. Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Washington Square Press, 1984), p. 54.
131. Eleanor Barkhorn, “Why People Prayed for Boston on Twitter and Facebook, and Then Stopped,” The Atlantic, April 20, 2013; available online at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/why-people-prayed-for-boston-on-twitter-and-facebook-and-then-stopped/275137.
132. Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner, 2012), p. 47.
133. Ibid., pp. 357–63.
134. Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. one, “In Defense of Universal Values.” Cited in Steven D. Smith, Disenchantment, p. 167. For more on why a secular account of human rights does not work, see both Smith’s Disenchantment and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 323–341.
135. Solomon, Far from the Tree, p. 147.
136. Ibid., p. 697.
137. Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue?, p. 128.
138. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), p. 142.
139. Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 1, 3.
140. Ibid., p. 5.
141. Quoted in Delbanco, Real American Dream, p. 109.
142. Ibid., pp. 96–97.
143. Ibid., pp. 102.
144. Ibid., p.103.
145. Robert Bellah et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press, 1985).
146. Wood, “New You.”
147. William H. Willimon, Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry (Abingdon, 2002), p. 99.
148. Ibid., pp. 98–99.
149. I recount the biblical story of Naaman and the prophet Elisha in detail in Counterfeit Gods (Dutton, 2009).
150. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), p. 50.
CHAPTER 4—THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
151. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Random House, 1991), p. 128.
152. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard Popkin (Hackett Pub, 1980), p. 63.
153. See Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Anchor, 1967); and see Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Doubleday, 1969), pp. 40ff (chap. 2, “The Perspective of Sociology: Relativizing the Relativizers”).
154. J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind 64, no. 254 (April 1955), cited in Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 460.
155. See Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans, 1974) and The Nature of Necessity (Oxford University Press, 1974). The first place Plantinga gave a high-level treatment of the subject was in God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Cornell University Press, 1967; paperback ed. 1990), pp. 115–55 (chap. 5, “The Problem of Evil,” and chap. 6, “The Free Will Defense”).
156. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, p. 461.
157. William P. Alston, “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 30–67.
158. See Daniel Howard-Snyder, ed., The Evidential Argument from Evil (Indiana University Press, 1996). Alvin Plantinga interacts with probabilistic arguments set forth by William Rowe and Paul Draper, in his Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 465–81.
159. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Inter-Varsity Press, 2003), p. 552. This summarizes the cumulative arguments of Plantinga and his colleague.
160. Van Inwagen, Problem of Evil, p. 6.
161. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (rev. ed.; Harper, 1978), pp. 255–56. For an example of this view in Irenaeus, see “Against Heresies,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Hendrickson, 1994), vol. I, pp. 521–22.
162. A selection of Augustine’s writings on evil and free will is found in A. I. Melden, ed., Ethical Theories (2nd ed.; Prentice-Hall, 1955).
163. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 367.
164. This is the view that evil is not a substance or thing but the “privation” of the good. The illustration of sight is often used to clarify the position. The inability of a tree to see is not evil, because sight is not part of the tree’s nature. However, the inability of a human being to see with her eyes would be considered suffering or evil because visual sight is what human eyes are for. This view of evil as privation has been quite influential, put forth not just by Augustine and Aquinas but by many Protestant Reformed theologians and modern apologists like C. S. Lewis. While I think that, on the whole, it is a helpful way to think about evil, others point out the problems with at least some forms of this view—the view of Etienne Gilson, the Thomist theologian, that evil is basically “non-being.” But is that all evil is? Doesn’t the Bible depict it as a more active, aggressive force than that? Perhaps it is right to say that evil leads to weakening, disintegration, but to call evil just “slipping into non-being” seems far too thin a description. In the end, calling evil a corrupt condition rather than a created thing doesn’t really answer the question why God allowed it. See John Frame’s criticism of the evil-as-privation view in his essay “The Problem of Evil,” in Suffering and the Goodness of God, eds. Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (Crossway, 2008), pp. 144–52. For a good summary of the view of evil-as-privation with citations of where this view was developed by Thomas Aquinas, see Jeremy A. Evans, The Problem of Evil: The Challenge to Essential Christian Beliefs (Broadman, 2013), pp. 1–2.
165. Van Inwagen, Problem of Evil, p. 90.
166. Ibid., pp. 85–86. Van Inwagen rejects the idea that the biblical story of the fall in Genesis—with Adam and Eve—could have happened literally. He says that “it contradicts what science has discovered about human evolution and the history of the physical universe” (p. 84). But van Inwagen, a Christian, believes Genesis 1–3 was a representation “of actual events in human pre-history” (p. 85). The story van Inwagen tells is about God directing the course of evolution until there were perhaps “a few score” of primates, and God then “miraculously raised them to rationality . . . gave them gifts of language, abstract thought, and disinterested love—and, of course, the gift of free will . . . because free will is necessary for love” (p. 85). These original ancestors lived in a paradisiacal state, because they lived in the “harmony of perfect love” and “possessed . . . preternatural powers” that made them safe from disease, destructive natural events, aging, and death (p. 86). But in this story, these first human beings—created for a perfect world without suffering—turn away from God, rebelling against his rightful authority. “They abused the gift of free will and separated themselves from their union with God” (p. 86). The result is both moral and natural evil. Natural evil came because “they now faced destruction by the random forces of nature around them as a natural consequence of their rebellion.” Moral evil came because “they formed the genetic substrate of what is called original or birth sin; an inborn tendency to do evil” (p. 87).
Van Inwagen argues that he does not need to prove his story to be true for it to serve its purpose. The argument against God from evil insists that there can’t be any good reason why God would allow evil and suffering. That is its premise. Van Inwagen says, “I contend [only] that, given that the central character of the story, God, exists, the . . . story might well be true” (p. 90). But if the story gives a credible explanation of why God might allow evil and suffering—even if we can’t be sure this is why God does allow it, that proves that the premise of the argument from evil—that there is no possible good reason for evil—is false.
Van Inwagen’s story and argument is ingenious, and it allows people with Christian beliefs who believe in evolution to still use the Fall of humankind as an explanation for the existence of natural and moral evil. Nevertheless, while it has a lot of merit as a philosophical argument with skeptics, I do not believe this story fits in with the biblical accounts themselves. If there was no actual Adam and Eve, we can’t explain why all human beings are equally sinful, nor how we reconcile what Paul says in Romans 5 and in 1 Corinthians 15 about Adam being a representative for the whole human race. For more on this subject, see chapter 8 and notes.
167. Ibid., p. 90.
168. For a comprehensive argument that “libertarian freedom” is not the biblical definition, see the classic essay “Human Freedom” by G. C. Berkouwer in his Man: The Image of God (Eerdmans, 1962), pp. 310–48.
169. For an excellent survey on the biblical material, see D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil (2nd ed.; Baker, 1990), pp. 177–203 (chap. 11, “The Mystery of Providence”). See also J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Inter-Varsity Press, 1961).
170. Alvin Plantinga gives the shorter version and Peter van Inwagen the “expanded” version of the free will theodicy. In both cases they claim that they are giving a defense, not a theodicy. Yet to me and to others, it seems that they are indeed offering the free will story as a theodicy, because they are using it to answer the question why God would allow evil and suffering.
171. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Harper eBook, 2009); Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford University Press, 1998).
172. See Donald A. Turner, “The Many-Universes Solution to the Problem of Evil,” in Richard M. Gale and Alexander R. Pruss, eds., The Existence of God, Aschgate, 2003. pp. 143–59.
173. Ibid.
174. Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in Alvin Plantinga, eds. James E. Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen (Reidel, 1985), p. 35.
175. The dialogue between the atheist and the theist over the problem of evil is found in van Inwagen, Problem of Evil, p. 64.
176. Ibid., p. 65.
177. It’s helpful to notice that in offering this defense—not a full theodicy—against the argument from evil, the believer in God may (in showing the kinds of good reasons that God may have for allowing evil to continue) draw on some of the best thinking that has been offered in the traditional theodicies. Each theodicy offered cogent but not sufficient reasons that God allowed suffering.
178. Stated by Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 481–82.
179. Stephen John Wykstra, “Rowe’s Noseeum Arguments from Evil,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 126–49.
180. Wykstra, “Rowe’s Noseeum,” p. 126.
181. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 466–67.
182. The most prominent proponent of the evidential argument from evil is William Rowe. See William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 335–41.
183. Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder is available at http://www.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses/hon462/hon462_assets/sound_of_thunder.htm.
184. Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, p. 543.
185. Van Inwagen, Problem of Evil, p. 97.
186. Elie Wiesel, Night (Hill and Wang, 1960).
187. Ibid., pp. 43–44.
188. It is important to note that Elie Wiesel himself, though presenting the objection to God’s existence and goodness so powerfully, did not ultimately abandon belief in God.
189. J. Christiaan Beker, Suffering and Hope: The Biblical Vision and the Human Predicament (Eerdmans, 1994). My information is taken from a preface, “The Story behind the Book,” written by Ben C. Ollenburger.
190. Ibid., p. 16.
191. Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées (Echo Library, p. 70), Pensées, 276, 277.
192. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Macmillan, 1960) p. 31.
193. C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Eerdmans, 1967), p. 69.
194. Ibid., pp. 69–70.
195. Ibid., p. 70.
196. Ibid., pp. 69–70.
197. Alvin Plantinga, “A Christian Life Partly Lived,” in Philosophers Who Believe, ed. Kelly James Clark (IVP, 1993), p. 73. See also Plantinga’s letter to Peter van Inwagen. “I’m inclined to believe that there is a . . . problem of evil for atheists. . . . I believe there wouldn’t be any such thing as right and wrong at all, and hence no such thing as evil, if theism were false . . . ,” van Inwagen, Problem of Evil, p. 154, n14.
198. A. N. Wilson, “Why I Believe Again,” The New Statesman, April 2, 2009.
199. Andrea Palpant Dilley, Faith and Other Flat Tires: Searching for God on the Rough Road of Doubt (Zondervan, 2012), pp. 224–25.
200. Dilley’s comment appears in an interview with Micha Boyett at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/michaboyett/2012/04/andrea-palpant-dilley-doubt-flat-tires-and-the-goodness-of-god.
CHAPTER 5—THE CHALLENGE TO FAITH
201. Van Inwagen, Problem of Evil, p. 89.
202. NIV-1984 translation.
203. Alvin Plantinga, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa,’” in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, ed. Peter van Inwagen (Eerdmans, 2004), p. 18. This article seems to take a more traditional Calvinistic approach to the problem of evil than Plantinga’s more well known “Free Will Defense.” See also van Inwagen’s note that Calvinistic theodicies have promise, though he doesn’t think they are yet strongly formulated enough; van Inwagen, Problem of Evil, p. 163, n9.
204. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Macmillan, 1946), p. 64.
205. J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Field of Cormallen,” chapter in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (various editions).
206. Berger, Sacred Canopy, p. 74.
207. Ibid., p. 75.
208. Ibid., pp. 76–77.
209. Ibid., p. 78.
210. John Dickson, If I Were God I’d End All the Pain: Struggling with Evil, Suffering, and Faith (Matthias Media, 2001), pp. 66–67.
211. Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are (Zondervan, 2010), pp. 154–55.
212. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, p. 50.
213. John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), p. 79.
CHAPTER 6—THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD
214. C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology (Harper, 2001), p. 49.
215. Many will question the entire Genesis account as being out of accord with the overwhelming consensus of science, namely that life on earth evolved over the ages through a process of natural selection. That means that violence, suffering, and death were already existent (in massive amounts) before human beings ever appeared. As we saw earlier, Peter van Inwagen in The Problem of Evil, pp. 85–86, gives an account that is true “for all we know” in which, after guiding many years of evolution, God adopts a small number of hominids into full humanness—giving them the image of God and also creating a paradisiacal enclave in the world where they lived in the “harmony of perfect love” and “possessed . . . preternatural powers” that made them safe from disease, destructive natural events, aging and death. But “they abused the gift of free will and separated themselves from their union with God” (p. 86). The result is that the natural evil—the suffering and death—out in the rest of the world engulfed them. “They now faced destruction by the random forces of nature around them as a natural consequence of their rebellion.” Also, of course, for the first time the world saw moral evil, since now human nature was corrupted by sinful self-centeredness.
As I wrote earlier, I do not believe this story fits in with the rest of the Bible, let alone Genesis. If there was no actual Adam and Eve, then we can’t explain why all human beings are equally sinful, nor how we reconcile what Paul says in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 about Adam being a representative for the whole human race. I believe there was a historical couple who turned from God and who brought natural and moral evil into the world and from whom all human beings are descended. Nevertheless, if you believe in a literal Adam and Eve and yet also believe that life came about on the earth through evolution, the same basic story of van Inwagen could serve you in a similar way. In this story, God adopts (or creates de novo) Adam and Eve and puts them in the Garden of Eden enclave. It was a paradise without suffering and death. This was the world God had created human beings for and also the kind of life that would have prevailed across the globe had Adam and Eve obeyed God. However, as soon as they fell, the surrounding world instead came upon them, and the natural evil of the world was enhanced by the addition of moral evil, making the world a very dark place. This story supports the basic biblical teaching that the suffering and evil of the world, as well as all moral evil and human death, are due to human sin.
216. See Walter C. Kaiser, “Eight Kinds of Suffering in the Old Testament,” in Suffering and Goodness, eds. Morgan and Peterson, pp. 68–69. See also Klaus Koch, “Is There a Doctrine of Retribution in the Old Testament?” in Theodicy in the Old Testament, ed. James L. Crenshaw (Fortress, 1983), pp. 57–87.
217. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 9.
218. Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel (SCM Press, 1972), pp. 144–76 (chap. 9, “The Self-Revelation of Creation”).
219. Ibid., p. 310.
220. Graeme Goldsworthy, The Goldsworthy Trilogy: Gospel and Wisdom (Paternoster, 2000), pp. 428–58.
221. M. J. Lerner and D. T. Miller, “Just World Research and the Attribution Process: Looking Back and Ahead,” Psychological Bulletin 85: 1030–1051. Cited in Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science (Arrow Books, 2006), p. 146.
222. David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 99, 101, 103–104. I should add that, in my opinion, Hart puts too much emphasis on this one strand of a biblical theology of suffering—suffering as injustice and as an enemy of God—and essentially turns away from the other biblical material about God’s sovereignty over and purposes in suffering. In the book, Hart admits a sympathy for ancient Gnosticism, which did not believe that the high God could have had anything to do with evil and suffering, that it could not be part of his plan in any way. Hart may also be sympathetic to the position of Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov, who rejects a God who might be using suffering in any way to bring about a “greater good.” Karamazov shows the self-righteousness of the modern inhabitant of the “immanent frame” who is sure ahead of time that on Judgment Day, God could not reveal any insight or wisdom that Karamazov has not already thought of. It is important to hold this truth—that suffering is something God hates—together with the teaching that God is sovereign over it. If we refuse to believe that God’s suffering and evil are ever part of God’s plan, we not only turn our back on a fair amount of biblical teaching (as we will see), but we also are left without the comfort that God is somehow working in actual experiences and incidents of evil. Nor will we have much incentive to think that God might be teaching us something so that we can grow through it.
223. B. B. Warfield, “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” in The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Samuel G. Craig (P&R, 1950), p. 115.
224. Ibid., pp. 116–17.
225. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 9.
226. Ibid., p. 261.
227. The view that humanity’s free will is compatible with God’s absolute determination of history is one that is especially associated with Reformed theology. For an alternate view, see Roger Olson, Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (Inter-Varsity Press, 2006). Philosophers such as Peter van Inwagen also argue that free will is incompatible with determinism. Two at-length descriptions of the view I am putting forth here are D. A. Carson, Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility: Biblical Perspectives in Tension (John Knox, 1981), and Packer, Evangelism.
228. There are almost innumerable passages that teach God’s absolute control over all things that happen in history (cf. Gen 14:8; Prov 21:1; Matt 10:29; Rom 9:20ff.) as well as which teach that every human being is responsible for their choices and actions (cf. Matt 25; Rom 2:1–16; Rev 20:11–13).
229. In a classic passage, J. I. Packer characterizes the relationship of divine sovereignty to human responsibility as an “antinomy,” which he defines as “the appearance of contradiction . . . an apparent incompatibility between two apparent truths.” An antinomy exists when two principles stand side by side, seemingly irreconcilable, yet both undeniable. He then offers the example of light—which sometimes behaves as waves, sometimes as particles. While it is not clear how it can behave in both ways (since, classically understood, a wave is not a particle and vice versa), nevertheless it does. In the same way, according to the Bible, God must be sovereign or much of history is meaningless, happening for no good purpose; also we must be responsible, or so much of what we do with our lives is meaningless. The Bible teaches both. Packer is at pains to say this contradiction is not real, only apparent, because of our limitations as observers. See Packer, Evangelism, pp. 18–19.
230. Carson, How Long, O Lord?, p. 189.
231. Ibid.
232. This verse says that God is the ultimate source of everything in the world that is good. Literally, it says “every good giving and perfect gift comes down . . .” J. B. Adamson sums up the verse’s teaching as: “All human good comes from the perfect Father of the universe.” J. B. Adamson, The Epistle of James. The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1976), p. 74.
CHAPTER 7—THE SUFFERING OF GOD
233. Dan G. McCartney, Why Does It Have to Hurt?: The Meaning of Christian Suffering (P&R, 1998), p. 56. Emphasis mine.
234. Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (Inter-Varsity Press, 1967), p. 86.
235. J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Exodus: The Days of our Pilgrimage (Inter-Varsity Press, 2005), p. 69.
236. Carson, How Long, O Lord?, p. 166.
237. See F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 694. Cited in Carson, How Long, O Lord?, p. 164.
238. Kidner, Genesis, p. 86. Emphasis mine.
239. Carson, How Long, O Lord?, p. 159.
240. McCartney, Why Does It Hurt?, pp. 57, 59.
241. R. M. M’Cheyne, Sermons of the Rev. Robert Murray M’Cheyne (Banner of Truth, 1961), pp. 47–49.
242. McCartney, Why Does It Hurt?, p. 60.
243. See Douglas John Hall, God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross (Augsburg, 1986). See also Warren McWilliams, The Passion of God: Divine Suffering in Contemporary Protestant Theology (Mercer University Press, 1985).
244. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 261.
245. Ibid.
246. Albert Camus, The Rebel (Vintage, 1956), p. 34. Quoted in Berger, Sacred Canopy, p. 77.
247. Albert Camus, Essais (Gallimard, 1965), p. 444.
248. Berger, Sacred Canopy, p. 77.
249. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (new ed. in 2 vols.; Eerdmans, 1996), p. 729.
250. Ibid.
251. Christopher J. H. Wright, The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith (Zondervan, 2008), p. 64.
252. Ibid., p. 67.
253. Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross, p. 131.
254. These two views of evil are sometimes called the “Boethian” and “Manichean” views, named after Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, and the ancient Manichees. Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle Earth, provides a fascinating look at how Tolkien’s work The Lord of the Rings depicts evil as “both-and.” It is both an inner lack and a real power in the universe. Shippey shows that sometimes the Ring in the narrative acts as a psychic magnifier of what is twisted and wrong inside the wearer, but other times it is depicted of having a malevolent power of its own. In my view, this “both-and” fits the Bible’s view of evil as well. See Shippey, The Road to Middle Earth (Mariner Books, 2003), pp. 138ff.
255. John Calvin, Introduction to Olievatan’s translation of the New Testament.
256. Ibid., p. 132.
257. Ibid., pp. 131–32.
258. Ibid., p. 132.
259. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, chapter 34. The character who says these words, Ivan Karamazov, rejects even this possibility, but that does not mean that Dostoevsky himself does not believe this eloquent statement. I think it should also be stated that Dostoevsky does not say here it will be possible to justify the evil itself. Evil may be used by God to bring about even greater good than if it had not occurred, but it nonetheless remains evil, and therefore inexcusable and unjustifiable in itself.
CHAPTER 8—THE REASON FOR SUFFERING
260. Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, p. 136.
261. Ibid.
262. Ibid., p. 137.
263. Ibid., p. 138.
264. Ibid.
265. Ibid., p. 140.
266. Robert A. Emmons, The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns: Motivation and Spirituality in Personality (Guilford, 1999), and “Personal Goals, Life Meaning, and Virtue,” in Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well Lived, eds. Corey L. M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt (APA, 2003), pp. 105–28. Cited in Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, p. 143.
267. Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, p. 145.
268. Ibid.
269. Ibid., p. 141.
270. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Harcourt, 1958), p. 90.
271. Ibid., p. 92.
272. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), letter #121. Quoted at http://tolkien.cro.net/rings/sauron.html.
273. Jonathan Edwards, The Miscellanies [entry nos. a–z, aa–zz, 1–500], The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 13. Edited by Thomas A. Schafer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), no. 448, p. 495.
274. Elisabeth Elliot, No Graven Image (Avon Books, 1966).
275. Ibid., p. 158.
276. Ibid., p. 164.
277. Ibid., p. 165.
278. Ibid., p. 174.
279. Ibid., p. 175.
280. Ibid.
281. Elisabeth Elliot, These Strange Ashes (Harper, 1975), p. 109.
282. Ibid., pp. 130–32.
283. The account of this is found in Elisabeth Elliot, Through the Gates of Splendor (2nd ed.; Hendrickson, 2010).
284. Ibid., p. 268.
285. Elisabeth Elliot, “The Glory of God’s Will,” in Declare His Glory among the Nations, ed. David Howard (Inter-Varsity Press, 1977), p. 133.
286. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 47.
287. Cindy Stauffer, “Film Depicting Nickel Mines Shootings Questioned,” Lancaster Online, http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/249326_Film-depicting-Nickel-Mines-shootings-questioned.html.
288. Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, and David L. Weaver-Zercher, Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
289. Ibid., p. 183.
290. Ibid., p. 176–77.
291. Ibid., p. 181.
292. This story, and much of what Joni learned in the first years after her accident, are told in a fine book on suffering, Joni Eareckson Tada and Steve Estes, A Step Further (Zondervan, 1978). The chapter on Denise Walters is “When Nobody’s Watching,” pp. 56–62.
293. Ibid., p. 59.
294. Ibid., p. 61.
295. Ibid., p. 62.
CHAPTER 9—LEARNING TO WALK
296. Quoted in Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, p. 152.
297. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 134 (chap. 10, “Hope”).
298. Davies, Importance of Suffering, p. 133.
299. Ibid., p. 130.
300. Ibid. Emphasis is the author’s.
301. Ibid., p. 131.
302. Ibid., pp. 133–34.
303. Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, p. 146.
304. Ibid., pp. 146–47.
305. John Newton, The Letters of John Newton (Banner of Truth, 1960), p. 180.
306. Quoted in C. S. Lewis, “Epigraph,” The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, 2001), p. viii.
307. See D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 247–59 (chap. 18, “In God’s Gymnasium”).
308. Michael Horton, A Place for Weakness (Zondervan, 2006), p. 19.
309. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (Harper, 2009), p. 70.
310. Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, pp. 63–64.
311. John S. Feinberg, “A Journey in Suffering: Personal Reflections on the Religious Problem of Evil,” in Suffering and Goodness, eds. Morgan and Peterson, p. 214.
312. Ibid., p. 215.
313. Ibid., p. 217.
314. Ibid., p. 218.
315. Ibid., p. 219.
316. Ibid.
317. Carson, How Long, O Lord?, pp. 18, 20.
318. Ibid., p. 20.
CHAPTER 10—THE VARIETIES OF SUFFERING
319. I am aware that Jonah and David were not New Testament believers in Jesus Christ, and so Paul’s claims about believers “in Christ” cannot be applied directly to them. The comparison of the status of Old Testament Jewish believers and New Testament Christians is a complex subject. But for our purposes, we need to ask ourselves if we as believers today are punished for our sins by God in suffering. The best answer—which does justice to what the Bible says—is that, strictly speaking, we are not being given the just penalty for our sins. Jesus took that. But can God bring bad things into our lives as “corrective discipline” the way a parent brings painful consequences into a child’s life to teach him or her to obey? The Bible says yes, he does.
320. Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 67ff.
321. Ibid., pp. 68, 70.
322. Ibid., p. 68.
323. Solomon, Far From the Tree.
324. Weil, Waiting for God, p. 69.
325. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), p. 914.
326. Ibid., p. 70.
327. Ibid.
328. Ibid., p. 71.
329. D. A. Carson, For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Treasures of God’s Word, vol. 2 (Crossway, 1999), February 17 reading. Free online at http://s3.amazonaws.com/tgc-documents/carson/1999_for_the_love_of_God.pdf.
330. Feinberg, “Journey in Suffering,” p. 222.
331. Ibid., pp. 223–24.
332. Ibid., p. 224.
333. John Feinberg relates that one of his students and his wife had an infant who died. Someone said to them, in all sincerity, “You know, it’s probably a good thing your son died. . . . Maybe he would have been a drug addict. . . . God knows these things in advance and he was probably saving you from those problems.” Feinberg, “Journey in Suffering,” p. 221.
CHAPTER 11—WALKING
334. While Matthew Bridges is given credit for most of the hymn “Crown Him with Many Crowns” from his work The Passion of Jesus, 1852, the verse quoted, verse 3, is attributed to Godfrey Thring, Hymns and Sacred Lyrics, 1874. Public domain.
335. Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker, 2005), p. 94.
336. J. Alec Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah: An Introduction and Commentary (Inter-Varsity Press, 1993), p. 331.
337. “Twelve of the forty-one New Testament occurrences of the verb [to suffer] come in this brief letter, together with four of the sixteen occurrences of the noun form. . . . These figures indicate clearly that suffering is a major theme in 1 Peter.” I. Howard Marshall, 1 Peter, The IVP New Testament Commentary Series (Inter-Varsity Press, 1991), p. 89n.
338. Frederick W. Danker and Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3rd ed.; University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 793.
339. Marshall, 1 Peter, p. 42.
340. Peter’s statement that gold “perishes even though refined by fire” does not mean he believes that fire can destroy gold. It can melt it but not destroy it. Most commentators believe Peter is here contrasting gold with faith. He is “simply drawing a contrast between faith and gold as respectively lasting and not lasting into the next world.” Marshall, 1 Peter, p. 41n.
341. Many commentators see the story of Daniel 3 to be a “midrash” or commentary on Isaiah 43:2. See John E. Goldingay, Daniel, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 30 (Word, 1998), p. 68.
342. J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Exodus: The Bible Speaks Today (Inter-Varsity Press, 2005), p. 51.
343. Iain M. Duguid, Daniel, Reformed Expository Commentary (P&R, 2008), p. 58.
CHAPTER 12—WEEPING
344. Tremper Longman III, How to Read the Psalms (Inter-Varsity Press, 1988), p. 26.
345. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, p. 258.
346. Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax, in Works, vol. 1 (Banner of Truth, 2001).
347. Joseph Bayly, The View from a Hearse (Cook, 1969), pp. 40–41.
348. Derek Kidner, Psalms 73–150: A Commentary on Books III–V of the Psalms (Inter-Varsity Press, 1973), p. 316.
349. Martin Marty, A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart (Harper, 1983), p. 68.
350. Derek Kidner, Psalms 1–72: A Commentary on Books I–II of the Psalms (Inter-Varsity Press, 1973), p. 157. This comment comes at the end of his commentary on Psalm 39, the other psalm in the Psalter that also ends without an expression of hope.
351. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Houghton Mifflin, one volume edition, 1994, p. 913.
352. Kidner, Psalms 73–150, p. 317.
353. Quoted in Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart (Servant, 1995), p. 73.
354. Michael Wilcock, The Message of Psalms 73–150: Songs for the People of God (Inter-Varsity Press, 2001), p. 65.
355. Commentators have noted a certain ambiguity in Peter’s verbs—they can be taken as both present indicatives as well as present imperatives. This is why the translators convey the verb tenses with some difficulty—“You may have had to suffer grief.” Many see the ambiguity as deliberate and skillful. It means that those who are already simultaneously rejoicing and grieving can read Peter as commending them, and those who are not yet doing this can read Peter as directing and urging them to do so. See Marshall, 1 Peter, p. 93.
356. Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, pp. 220–21.
CHAPTER 13—TRUSTING
357. Quoted in Preface to These Strange Ashes (Revell, 1982), p. 7.
358. Kidner, Genesis, p. 199.
359. Ibid., p. 205.
360. Elliot, “Glory of God’s Will,” p. 130.
361. Kidner, Genesis, p. 181.
362. Newton, Letters, pp. 179–80.
363. Kidner, Genesis, p. 207.
CHAPTER 14—PRAYING
364. Quoted in Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life (Ignatius Press, 1989), p. 61, “Job: Life as Suffering.”
365. Ibid.
366. “Job stands far above its nearest competitors, in the coherence of its sustained treatment of the theme of human misery, in the scope of its many-sided examination of the problem . . . in the heights of its lyrical poetry, in its dramatic impact, and in the intellectual integrity with which it faces the ‘unintelligible burden’ of human existence. In all this Job stands alone. Nothing . . . has risen to the same heights. Comparison only serves to enhance the solitary greatness of the book of Job.” Francis I. Anderson, Job: An Introduction and Commentary (Inter-Varsity Press, 1976), p. 32.
367. Anderson, Job, p. 123.
368. Ibid., p. 124.
369. Ibid., p. 125.
370. Gerald H. Wilson, Job, New International Biblical Commentary (Hendrickson, 2007), p. 422.
371. Anderson, Job, p. 270, n2, quoted from George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932, pp. 12, 19.
372. Wilson, Job, p. 423.
373. Anderson, Job, p. 270, n1.
374. Ibid., p. 287.
375. Ibid., pp. 287–88. See also Thomas Nagel’s review of John Gray’s book The Silence of Animals in The New York Times Book Review. Gray charges that western secular society believes it can rid the world of evil through human self-improvement, without God, but that many such grandiose schemes have led to greater evil. Nagel admits that “It is true that we are faced with a secular version of the problem of evil: how can we expect beings capable of behaving so badly to design and sustain a system that will lead them to be good? Gray is right that some of the attempted solutions to this problem have been catastrophic. . . .” Thomas Nagel, “Pecking Order,” The New York Times Book Review, July 7, 2013, p. 10.
376. Elisabeth Elliot, “Epilogue II,” in Through the Gates of Splendor (40th Anniversary ed.; Tyndale, 1996), p. 267.
377. Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, pp. 20–21.
378. John White, The Masks of Melancholy: A Christian Physician Looks at Depression & Suicide (1982). Quote from audio.
379. Anderson, Job, p. 267.
380. Wilson, Job, p. 455.
381. Anderson, Job, p. 73.
CHAPTER 15—THINKING, THANKING, LOVING
382. Quoted in C. S. Lewis, “Epigraph,” The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, 2001), p. viii.
383. “But what Paul says here is much less clear than the English translations would lead one to believe. The impression given is that he is calling on them one final time to ‘give their minds’ to nobler things. That may be true in one sense, but the language and grammar suggest something slightly different. The verb ordinarily means to ‘reckon’ in the sense of ‘take into account,’ rather than simply to ‘think about.’ This suggests that Paul is telling them not so much to ‘think high thoughts’ as to ‘take into account’ the good they have long known from their own past, as long as it is conformable to Christ.” G. D. Fee Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 415–16.
384. There are innumerable examples that could be given of the bleakness of the secular view of things. Charles Darwin wrote: “A [person] who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones” (Charles Darwin, Evolutionary Writings, edited by James A. Secord, p. 396. See books.google.com.). Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the great Supreme Court Justice, and a formidable intellectual in the early twentieth century, once wrote this in his personal correspondence to a friend: “There is no reason for attributing to a man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand. . . . The world has produced the rattlesnake as well as me; but I kill it if I get a chance . . . and the only reason is because it is congruous to the world I want, the world everyone is trying to make according to one’s own power.” (Paraphrased from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Essential Holmes, edited and with an introduction by Richard A. Posner, pp. 108, 114. See books.google.com.) Historian Carl L. Becker famously said that, from a strictly scientific viewpoint, human beings must be viewed as “little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn.” (Quoted in Steven D. Smith, Disenchantment, p. 179.) British philosopher John N. Gray writes scathingly about the modern secular myth that human beings have any unique value or meaning in life, or that there is any hope that we are getting better or that history is going somewhere. Human beings have no more value than animals or plants. “Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science,” he writes. “Evolution has no end-point or direction, so if the development of society is an evolutionary process it is one that is going nowhere.” Gray, The Silence of Animals, p. 78.
385. Jonathan Edwards, “Christian Happiness,” in Works of Jonathan Edwards: Sermons and Discourses 1720–1723, vol. 10, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (Yale University Press, 1992), p. 297.
386. This word has to do primarily with what people consider “lovable,” in the sense of having a friendly disposition toward. The NJB catches the sense well by translating, “everything that we love.” Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, p. 418.
387. How Augustine overthrew the “Eudaimonism”—the idea that the highest source of happiness is in one’s virtue—is told in chapters 7 and 8 of Wolterstorff, Justice. The phrase “Only Love of the Immutable Can Bring Tranquility” is a summary of Augustine’s teaching used as a heading for chapter 8, p. 180.
388. Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book IV, 11.
389. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Harcourt, 1988), p. 122.
390. Kidner, Psalms 1–72, p. 55.
391. See William L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 573–74.
392. Horatio Spafford, “It Is Well with My Soul,” 1873 hymn.
CHAPTER 16—HOPING
393. Howard Thurman, A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life, eds. Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber (Beacon Press, 1998), p. 71.
394. Ibid., p. 79.
395. There are numerous versions of this story, each somewhat different. See a typical one at http://www.family-times.net/illustration/Troubled/200318.
396. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory.” Found at https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.verber.com%2Fmark%2Fxian%2Fweight-of-glory.pdf, p. 8.
EPILOGUE
397. In this book we concentrated on those strategies—trusting, self-communing, reordering loves, etc.—that all varieties of suffering require. We did not, however, look at two spiritual skills that are, in some cases, very necessary. The first skill is receiving forgiveness from God through repentance and reconciliation with him. Often suffering reveals our own personal failures and we are filled with shame. It is critical to relieve that guilt and shame by receiving grace from God. On the other hand, we often need the skill of granting forgiveness to others. Many instances of adversity come from betrayals by others. In those cases, the danger is not to be eaten with guilt but with anger. It is critical to relieve anger by giving grace, but forgiving. In this volume, we did not treat either of these practices. Other books that can help are the following. J. R. W. Stott, Confess Your Sins: The Way of Reconciliation (Westminster, 1965); Dan Hamilton, Forgiveness (Inter-Varsity Press, 1980); Judith Gundry-Volf and Miroslav Volf, A Spacious Heart: Essays on Identity and Belonging (Trinity Press, 1997). And see Timothy Keller and Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (Dutton, 2011), pp. 159–69.